God as source of morality

One of the most frequently used defenses of religion is the Argument from Morality - that the sheer existence of a moral sense, of the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, prove that god exists. Without god, specifically the Christian god, morality could not exist.

Morality Pre-dates the god of Christianity
One of the most obvious problems with this is that the philosophical study of ethics and morality existed long before the Christian religion, getting it's big start when god was setting bushes on fire for Moses. There were laws against murder, theft, and fraud long, long before the Bible was around.

The Greek philosophers were pagans. If there is a Christian god, or even a Hebrew god, he certainly wasn't helping the Greeks form their sophisticated (and still relevant) moral philosophy. Clearly morals and morality can exist without a god, because they existed before the god of Western Civilization emerged out of primitive Middle Eastern mythology. The Greeks didn't attribute their moral sense to their own Greek gods, either, but came to them through rational analysis and philosophy. Aristotle, the originator of "Virtue Ethics", one of the three great western ethical formulations (besides Deontology and Consequentialism), is still thriving after 2500 years. Obviously China, India, and other non-Western civilizations practiced their native forms of morality without the help of Jehovah. This clearly shows that there is no need to require god, particularly the Christian god for morality to exist.

Euthyphro Dilemma
Another compelling argument against the need for a god to teach us right vs wrong is Plato's Euthyphro dilemma. The dilemma, or question, is this: Does god love the good because it is good, or is it good because god says so? As Socrates posed it,

"The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods."

In plain English, does God tell us some act is right or wrong because he knows it is for good reasons? Or is an action right or wrong just because he says so? If we can accept that there really are only two options here (and for the sake of brevity, let's assume that - though I know there are rebuttals that characterize this as a false choice). If god loves good actions because they are inherently good, then that goodness preceds god and can exist without him. We should be able to base our morality on those reasons rather than requiring a god as a middle man to just relay that information to us. Therefore, we don't need god for good/evil to exist, so he is irrelevant. Also this limits his sovereignty and power - for he is not lord over good and evil, but is subject to it just as are humans. Morality would exist with or without god.

However, if something is good because god loves it and designates it as good, then this makes him arbitrary and fickle. He could just as easily love rape and murder as kindness and peace. If nothing is inherently good or evil unless god says so, then he has no basis for indicating that an act is good or evil except his own preference. This makes him arbitrary and capricious. There would be no particular reason for something being good or evil. It brings god's wisdom and rationality into question. If god would have commanded us to murder and torture each other (which, come to think of it, he actually does numerous times in the old testament), then this would automatically become good. This offends the "reflective equilibrium" of morality - it makes us question the entire concept of a god giving definitions of good and evil. We know at a deep level that murder is wrong, regardless of what a god may tell us about it. Allowing for a god that can just make whatever rules he likes puts him beyond good and evil, since something is only good after he says so. His very existence would transcend good and evil. Further, if we finally all become convinced that god does not really exist at all, then this would make good and evil non-existent, and "anything would go". This threat of "anything goes" is frequently used by Christians in sort of an "argument from consequences" to lobby for god's existence. According to them, we would live in a moral chaos without a god.

Both horns of the dilemma are fraught with problems. The only way out is to accept that god has nothing to do with morality. He doesn't give divine commands that create it, and he doesn't recognize what is already good and evil. The most reasonable course out of this situation is to just admit he doesn't exist and is irrelevant to the question of morality.

A common response by apologists is to say that goodness, and those traits we call good (love, generosity, charity) are bound up in god's nature - that the good and god are the same thing. But that is really just a different form of the arbitrary horn. If the primary attractive or positive trait of these good properties are their association or unity with god, then they are qualities without any moral nature of their own - empty properties. Hate could just as easily have been unified with god, or envy, or greed. For it to be preferable to think that generosity and love are more properly associated with god than hate and lust is to preassign them with moral value independent of god, or else to treat them as arbitrary qualities until god has adopted them.

Religion is a poor moral guide
The god of the bible is certainly no exemplar of moral virtue. The Ten Commandments he gave in Exodous are more about stopping people from worshiping other gods than about being good people. Number 1, 2, 3, and 4 have nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with submitting to god. As a set of ethical rules, the commandments are extremely self-serving. The rest are excruciatingly obvious - don't kill people, don't steal stuff, don't have sex with your neighbor, be good to your parent, etc. Not really a very sophisticated morality - I don't think they are the kind of rules only a god could think of. As far as the rest of the bible goes, see the chapter called God is a Moral Monster for some highlights on just what a sub-optimal moral instructor Jehovah really is. Slavery, rape, murder, infanticide, genocide - all these are on the menu for the Christian god. The argument that the bible is a good source of moral teachings falls flat. There may be some good advice scattered around, but it is impossible to overlook the dozens of places where it encourages criminal, sociopathic acts.

The very fact that we can recognize particularly horrendous sections of the bible demonstrates that we bring our own, non-bible-based morality to bear on our interpretation of the bible. We are repelled by passages which show how cruel and immoral the god of the old testament (in particular) and sometimes the new testament is. That we can recognize the murder, torture, abuse, and wanton cruelty found in many sections of the bible as unacceptable proves that we possess a morality that has an independent, non-religious origin. Christians perform amazing logical gymnastics to excuse these obvious failures of their god. Sometimes they recommend that the passages be taken metaphorically, or that people who rejected god brought it on themselves, or that the bible was written for the people of that day for whom this type of violence made sense, or they may even deny outright that the passages even exist. In any case, there is ample evidence in the pages of the bible that rather than being a proper guide to morality, the god of Judaism and Christianity is a moral monster at worst, or a very poor guide at best.

The real answer to the question about why the bible is all over the map with respect to its moral guidance (from elevated to depraved) is that it is a book written by men, one that reflects their strengths and weaknesses, their vision and their myopia, their kindness and generosity, and their cruelty and selfishness. It is not inspired, but mundane.

Absence of Moral consistency between and within religions
Many religions claim to have a direct channel to god, and to their god's moral teachings. But those moral teachings differ between the religions. This is strong evidence that it is not god who is imparting the moral message to them, but that they are each originating their own moral standards and then passing them off as a god's creation. Even within the different denominations of Christianity the teachings differ - in one it is OK to divorce, and not in another. In one you can't dance, but in another you can. The same differences in standards exist with respect to music, to which books are "good" to read and which are "bad", and so on. And even worse - within a single denomination, the rules change over time to keep in synch with the evolving moral standards of the community. For a while the Mormons could have multiple wives, now they can't. For a while is is OK for Catholics to kill witches, and now we don't even think witchcraft is a real thing. Clearly there is no "unchanging" and bedrock moral standard that is the basis for these rules. This is exactly what we would expect if morality was a social invention. If it were a god who was providing moral standards, we would certainly expect more consistency.

Objective morality
I don't know if it is all Christians, or just the ones I talk to, but they seem to have a very keen interest and commitment to the idea of "objective morality". And by this, I understand them to mean an "absolute, independent, external objective morality". The antithesis of "relativistic morality".

I can't refute that. I can't say with certainty that their god didn't give them a complete set of rules, but it seems very unlikely for a lot of reasons.

1. There are a lot of gods from a lot of religions, and they all seem to have their own proprietary set of absolute, but conflicting, moral codes. They can't all be the one "true" absolute morality.
2. Even within Christianity, the moral codes vary a lot - some are OK with divorce, some are not, some approve of gays, some do not, some are in favor or the death penalty and others not. This is more easily explained by conventional human disagreements than an indication that their god can't make up his mind.
3. Christian morality has changed a lot in the last several hundred years. This change is more easily explained by people and civilization changing than god changing.
4. The bible itself is full of contradictory morality: Are we supposed to stone those who practice witchcraft, or let "he is without sin cast the first stone?" That's just one of many internal conflicts.
5. Some of the moral instructions in the bible are just abominable. For details, see God is a Moral Monster.
6. Etc.

Really, all the Christians seem to be able to come up with as a justification is their book, and the personal feeling that many of them have that some things are just right and and others are just wrong, and that god happens to agree with them! I can't prove that god didn't give Christians their moral code - but the Christian moral system(s) are so messy and pieced-together, that it seems more the product of organic human construction than divine guidance. So, an external "absolute" moral system given to us by god is a hard claim to support.

But, I do think that some moral systems are "better" than others, even "objectively" better, but I doubt I am using the word, "objective" the same as the Christians are. "Objective" is a strange word - it lends itself to many interpretations. I use it here to mean "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice, based on facts, unbiased and unprejudiced". By this definition, if one wishes to safely cross the street, it is objectively better to wait for the "WALK" signal than to wander into oncoming traffic. This is not a matter of custom, prejudice, preference or convention. I don't use the word to refer to some external, transcendental truth.

A lot depends on what you conceive of a moral system to be. If you define it as "an absolutely mandate, a set of things god and the bible tells us to do", that is different than what I define it as. I see no evidence outside of the bible, and the holy books of other religions, that morality exists absolutely, "out there" in the world, independent of humans and human culture, like some kind of Platonic ideal.

Outside of the assertions made by these holy books, and from those who believe they have gotten certain instructions from god, morality doesn't need to have an existence outside of us. For example, if humans didn't exist at all, and never had, there would be no morality (unless some other non-human species developed their own version of it). For example, we don't find a "Neanderthal" morality, because there are no more Neanderthals. I suspect, though, that when they were around, they had some sort of moral code. After all, they were humans, just not Homo Sapiens. Some researchers (like Franz de Waal) have shown to my satisfaction that non-human species do have behavior systems that look a lot like precursors to what we would call morality (chimpanzees, wolves, etc). They certainly didn't get it from a holy book.

Instead, all indications (again, outside of religious authority) are that our morality is human dependent: a set of choices and judgements and preferences that we make as societies and as individuals. Morality is not imaginary or just something we cooked up. However, morality/ethics have human and social origins - at least that is the most economical explanation (every other explanation requires many more "entites", a la Occam's Razor). That makes morality contingent on human affairs and human nature, not absolute, independent and abstract. But it doesn't make morality arbitrary and totally relativistic. Some moral systems are objectively better suited to our human condition than others. And our human-originated morals systems seem to gradually improve over time - to become objectively better. Better in that they suit human flourishing better than they used to in medieval times. To quote Steven Pinker,

Has the world seen moral progress? The answer should not depend on whether one has a sunny or a morose temperament. Everyone agrees that life is better than death, health better than sickness, prosperity better than privation, freedom better than tyranny, peace better than war. All of these can be measured, and the results plotted over time. If they go up, that’s progress.

And they have gone up. As a result of the work of Enlightenment thinkers, social progress, advances in Political Philosophy (Locke, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Rousseau, etc), technology, and a whole collection of advances in civilization, the moral systems that man has created have made life better. For much, much more on this, I recommend looking at Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

So, I think we can say that objective morality does exist in this sense - if we want to flourish as individuals and as a society, it is objectively true that certain moral standards will encourage that outcome (like generosity, kindness, nurturing, fairness, democracy, liberty), and others will not (like genocide, rape, torture, injustice, tyranny, slavery). In this sense, relative ONLY to human goals, morality is objective. Outside of individual and culture interests, it doesn't appear necessary for morality or moral problems to actually have any existence.

Moral precursors in animals
A strong argument for the natural evolution of morality (rather than being of a supernatural origin) is the existence of primitive moral precursors in some of the higher primates and other species. I have written about this in another entry. See "Moral Animals". Research over the last several decades has shown that precursors of human morality exist in behaviors of many other social animals. The fact that it occurs in non-humans shows that morality, like other biological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral traits, is part of our evolutionary heritage, not a gift bestowed only on humans from a god. Franz de Waal, an expert primatologist, has described in books like Good Natured, that gorillas, elephants, whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs, and many other intelligent mammals show the basics of what, in humans, evolved into a moral code. Michael Shermer calls them "premoral sentiments". Shermer says, that these traits are common to both higher order animal species and humans:

attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group.

These animals are born with them, or learn them, or are born with the ability to learn them. Not only to they come into possession of these traits - they can't exist without them. Social animals who don't collaborate and harmonize with the group do not succeed. Those who do exhibit very human-like behaviors. They care for their injured, show generosity, have patience, can become outraged at violations of norms, experience grief at the death of family and friends, rejoice by themselves or with friends, can be kind, be protective and nurturing, work on their reputations, appreciate the reputations of others, feel shame and resentment, become bored, recognize injustice, and become upset by unfair situations. They recognize strange and deviant behavior in others, and will attack and drive out members of their own species that violate expectations and norms. You probably have seen how a poorly socialized dog, who was not brought up with other dogs, has trouble throughout his life accepting and being accepted by other dogs. A poorly socialized dog doesn't follow the norms that well socialized dogs adopt. They are breaking the rules, the animal rules which in human society very likely morphed into our moral and ethical codes. Zoo animals that are released into the wild are frequently not accepted by their own kind (possibly because they have not assimilated social norms, mating behaviors, and other rules of species interaction).

Why would animals need these characteristics? Why might they be evolutionarily adaptive? For exactly the same reasons that humans have them - it helps them and us live cooperatively in groups. We humans share many other traits with animals - the fundamentals of our biology, our moods, our conceptions, our desires. The difference is that in humans, those traits with cognitive components are expressed in far more elaborate forms - our emotions, our abstractions, our plans. But they exist in a continuum with our animal relatives - different in degree, but not in nature.

Argument from degrees
tbd

Anthropology/Archaeology
Anthropologists are piecing together the co-development of morality and civilization, as human culture progressed from tribes, to chiefdoms, to towns, city-states, and nations. Our morality evolved as our culture became more intricate. Investigations into the social interactions of primitive tribes, and examination of artifacts from extinct humans have demonstrated that, without a conventional conception of god or religion, the groups did have their own versions of morality. It developed in each cultural group that has been investigated. Taboos against certain act, attitudes towards sacred objects or places, concepts of fairness and reciprocity, preferences for liberty or tendencies towards tyranny, loyalty/betrayal, and other fundamental moral foundations are found in all cultures. They express themselves differently in all of them, but seem to represent diverse elaborations of basic human and cultural needs. These needs have been postulated by researchers like Jonathan Haidt rooted in an innate "moral foundation" which has a small number of "moral pillars" that are implemented differently in both individuals and societies. In his view, these fundamental pillars that most moral systems elaborate are:

1. Care/harm: related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, compassion, gentleness, and nurturance.
2. Fairness/cheating: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, fairness, proportionality, and autonomy.
3. Liberty/oppression: This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor.
4. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."
5. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions and institutions.
6. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination, as well as by the near universal tendency to find objects of worship. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants, and elevated by discipline, self-sacrifice, and a "pure" lifestyle (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

These are the elements of Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory", which is supported by much empirical evidence. This is a relatively new area of research (discovering the fundamental cultural elements of morality). Other researchers like Émile Durkheim, Richard Shweder (who identified autonomy, community, and divinity as his foundations of morality spanning all cultures), Margaret Meade, and others have clearly shown that morality is both wider and deeper than lessons brought to us through the bible. It predates the bible, and spans cultures that have never even heard of it, which have no religion, or which have religions that would appear totally bizarre to us. In the forward to one of Margaret Meade's books, the anthropologist, Franz Boas, wrote:

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Empirical
Phil Zuckerman's 2008 book, Society without God, notes that Denmark and Sweden, "which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world", enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world". On the opposite end, we see in the parts of the world with the highest religious beliefs (for example, the Moslem world) horrendous abuses of individual and group rights - executions, mutilations, torture, and denial of rights.

Neurological
Neuroscience has found several brain centers involved with moral deliberation (right temporo-parietal junction, prefrontal lobe, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and other areas). Our moral compass is mediated through physical brain structures, not from an angel whispering in our ear.

Scientists have shown that there are specific networks of brain regions involved in mediating moral judgment. Joshua Greene (most famous for his "Trolley Problem") at Harvard University has studied the involvement of different brain structures in making moral judgments. He, his team, and other follow-up research focused “on the specific difference between making judgments (i.e. ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’) on ‘moral personal’ dilemmas (e.g. throwing a person out of a sinking life-boat to save others), and ‘moral impersonal’ dilemmas (e.g. keeping money found in a lost wallet)” (from Raine and Yang, reviewers of Greene's work). His research shows that three brain structures — the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, the ventral prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus are deeply involved in the emotional processes that guide our moral decisions.

The ventral medial prefrontal cortex sits right behind the bridge of your nose, between your eyes and a little higher. When damaged, it reduces your emotional judgement, such that when you are presented with a moral decision, such as "what are the pros and cons of killing my children?", you actually consider them both as possible options, objectively, without an emotional component. You are unable to feel horror or disgust at the idea. It also makes it difficult to do anything that requires a decision, because you have no preference one way or the other for any alternative courses of action. All decisions become very hard, as hard (for example) as deciding between several different models of refrigerator. You become overwhelmed with choices even for what should normally be simple choices. Even figuring out what food to eat, what to wear, or to go to work or not. In fact the decisions you would think are purely logical are just as hard, because you lack the motivation to even solve those problems. This demonstrates dramatically Hume's famous quote, "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions".

Additionally, researchers can manipulate these regions using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), temporarily disrupting the activity of neurons in targeted brain centers. By carefully adjusting the focus, they can stimulate or reduce activity in known regions and cause the subjects to respond to moral dilemmas differently.

Psychopaths and sociopaths have distinctly different brain activity associated with the emotional processing of moral decision making. The prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which help us recognize what we consider "immoral" acts and translates that recognition into inhibitory behavior, are far less active in these types of people. Psychopaths show reduced activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and medial frontal cortex in when presented with moral problems. They don't fear punishment, they don't empathize with other people, they don't respect authority. They have few, if any, inhibitions that stop them from breaking the rules and committing what most would regard as immoral acts. It is not that they have consciously decided to be immoral - their brains function differently, in a way that makes them more dangerous to their fellow man.

Julia Galef of the Rationally Speaking podcast commented on her realization that our internal moral inconsistencies, which used to trouble her, no longer do.

I used to <feel> like there must be a correct way to resolve that inconsistency. Just like you're reading a mathematical proof and you start off with a true statement and then you end up with a contradiction like one equals two, and something must have gone wrong along the way. I felt like I must be able to find the point where things went wrong. I think one way my thinking about ethics has evolved is that I've just really internalized the fact that our moral intuitions did not develop ... they weren't installed from the top down, and there was no reason for them to evolve to be consistent with each other. The different systems of cognition, of reasoning in our brain evolve somewhat separately from each other at different points in time, and in response to different evolutionary pressures, social and physical, etc.

It is completely reasonable and to be expected that moral reactions to different situations that involve different brain systems that evolved at different times in our history might not line up with each other exactly.

The research into the neuroscience of morality goes on and on. This short summary just is the tip of the iceberg. But all indications are that it is the brain and its structures that allow us to make moral judgments, and that damage to important neural circuits actually changes our moral thoughts and actions. This is yet another piece of evidence for the mundane, not ethereal, source of our morality.